The Public Image is Rotten – first look review | Little White Lies

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The Pub­lic Image is Rot­ten – first look review

26 Apr 2017

Words by Ed Gibbs

Man with spiky blonde hair sitting at a table, looking pensive and resting his chin on his hand.
Man with spiky blonde hair sitting at a table, looking pensive and resting his chin on his hand.
John Lydon’s post-Sex Pis­tols career is exam­ined in this inti­mate doc that proves as frus­trat­ing as it is fascinating.

Giv­en how well-doc­u­ment­ed the Sex Pis­tols have been on screen – most notably via Julien Temple’s def­i­nite doc The Filth and the Fury, and on through var­i­ous punk nos­tal­gia revivals – it’s sur­pris­ing that John­ny Rotten’s sec­ond act hasn’t been afford­ed any­where near the same space, after he formed Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed (PiL) in 1978.

Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er turned direc­tor Tab­bert Fiiller sets about address­ing this over­sight, with the co-oper­a­tion of his sub­ject and man­age­ment. Lydon is inter­viewed in var­i­ous set­tings, most­ly at home in Los Ange­les, where he speaks can­did­ly about being blight­ed by menin­gi­tis as a young boy – a trau­mat­ic and trans­for­ma­tive episode that under­stand­ably still haunts him today. Lat­er, Lydon’s role as a sur­ro­gate father is also briefly touched upon. For the most part, though, Fiiller’s film focus­es square­ly on the band’s ever-chang­ing for­tunes and line-ups, with some star­tling music in tow.

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The Pub­lic Image is Rot­ten duly serves up gen­er­ous amounts of live per­for­mance and inter­view footage, with mul­ti­ple sound­bites from assort­ed talk­ing heads, includ­ing var­i­ous PiL mem­bers who recount their tenures with a band that today counts Lydon as its only orig­i­nal member.

Odd­ly, some themes remain under­de­vel­oped, while oth­er, thornier sub­jects are com­plete­ly ignored. What, for instance, was it about those ear­ly PiL records that still leave Flea, Moby and Thurston Moore in awe? To what extent did the Sex Pis­tols reunion tour in the ear­ly 2000s dam­age Lydon’s cred­i­bil­i­ty? Equal­ly frus­trat­ing is the film’s appar­ent reluc­tance in intro­duc­ing Lydon’s long-term part­ner, Nora, for rea­sons best known to its subject.

Fiiller is clear­ly a fan. Aside from unearthing some great archive mate­r­i­al, he suc­cess­ful­ly brings togeth­er key mem­bers of PiL (includ­ing orig­i­nal bassist Jah Wob­ble) to try and make sense of the band’s com­plex make-up. Ulti­mate­ly, though, what the film lacks is a sto­ry. With such inti­mate access to his sub­ject, albeit with the above caveats in place, it may have been more effec­tive to sim­ply hang with Lydon op-doc style, rather than stick­ing to inter­view set-ups, regard­less of how loose the direc­tor tries to make them appear.

Lydon is a colour­ful and engag­ing char­ac­ter – and an intrigu­ing artist who has long been under­val­ued. It’s just a shame that this well-inten­tioned doc isn’t able to delve deep­er and bring more to the surface

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